SpaceX (SPCX) is deep in a downdraft. As of the July 20 close, the stock sat at $119.85 — down 47% from its post-IPO intraday high and already below its $135 initial public offering price. All eyes are now on Aug. 4, when the company will report second-quarter results after the market close and hold its analyst call. Can a single earnings release turn the tide?
The quarter itself won’t be without fireworks. Wall Street expects total revenue of roughly $6.87 billion, a sharp jump from the $4.7 billion booked in the first quarter. The connectivity business, anchored by Starlink, remains the workhorse with $3.26 billion in Q1 revenue, while the space launch segment added $620 million. But the real story is likely to come from artificial intelligence infrastructure, which generated $820 million in the first quarter.
In January, SpaceX acquired Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, gaining control of massive data centers including the Colossus facilities. Since then, the company has been renting out spare computing capacity at a staggering clip. In May, it struck a deal to provide $1.25 billion per month in computing power to Anthropic. In June, it signed Alphabet to a contract worth $920 million per month starting in October, and separately locked in Reflection AI at $150 million per month. Much of that revenue will be recognized over time, but the expectation is clear: AI segment revenue in Q2 should vault well above its first-quarter level, making it the report’s central narrative.
Even a strong quarter is unlikely to act as an immediate rescue. Two forces stand in the way.
The first is a looming supply shock. According to SpaceX’s S-1 filing, the company adopted an aggressive early-release structure for restricted shares. The initial tranche of early-release-eligible stock becomes salable on the second full Nasdaq trading day following the public release of second-quarter financial results. With earnings confirmed for an Aug. 4 after-hours release, that makes Aug. 6 the first day insiders can sell in size. And the unlock calendar only intensifies from there: an additional 7% of early-release shares will be freed on each of Aug. 31, Sept. 10, Sept. 25, Oct. 10 and Oct. 25. Another 28% will be released two days after the third-quarter report, followed by a full unlock of all remaining restricted shares on Dec. 9. With the stock already underwater versus its IPO, the decision by early holders to sell — or not — will provide a severe test of supply and demand. An additional 10% release could have been triggered if the stock averaged above $175.50 for five of the ten trading days leading up to Aug. 4, but at current levels that threshold is virtually out of reach.
The second headwind is the valuation itself. Even after the collapse, SpaceX trades at a price-to-sales ratio of 83.7 — more than 13 times the Nasdaq-100’s multiple of 6.2. Using Wall Street’s 2027 revenue estimate of $72.3 billion, the forward price-to-sales ratio still comes in at 23.3, a level that remains expensive relative to large-cap technology peers. That means even rapid single-quarter growth can hardly absorb the valuation overhang in the near term; much of the good news may already be priced in.
SpaceX’s long-term addressable market is genuinely thrilling. Management pegs the total opportunity across its three businesses at $28.5 trillion, with AI infrastructure alone potentially worth $26.5 trillion. Musk has floated the vision of launching orbital computing clusters powered by solar energy, avoiding complex cooling systems and using Starlink to beam data to Earth — a moat with virtually no competition.
But in the here and now, the Aug. 4 report looks more like a validation of the growth story than a catalyst for a lasting bounce. The lockup gates that swing open on Aug. 6, combined with a frothy valuation, are the real stress test. The wiser course, as many have noted, may be to keep the stock on a watch list, waiting to see how insiders behave once their shares become free and whether the company can eventually generate positive free cash flow rather than leaning on capital markets. One quarterly print, by itself, cannot shoulder the weight of a rescue.
